Abstract #0137

A Lightweight, Portable MRI Brain Scanner Based on a Rotating Halbach Magnet

Clarissa Zimmerman Cooley¹,², Jason P. Stockmann²,³, Brandon Dean Armstrong²,³, Matthew S. Rosen²,³, Lawrence L. Wald²

¹Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States; ²Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; ³Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States

A lightweight brain scanner based on a rotating permanent-magnet Halbach array is constructed and tested in phantom imaging. As the magnet is rotated around the object, the multipolar static field inhomogeneity creates generalized projections. The image is reconstructed using an iterative algebraic reconstruction technique based on knowledge of the field map. We show 2D phantom images containing aliasing artifacts similar to radial PatLoc images, which share the multipolar encoding field. These artifacts are greatly reduced through parallel imaging methods, which further reduce streaking and other residual artifacts while improving resolution.